Introduction
William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature was published in 1902. Some of the language and ideas grate upon contemporary sensibilities – but there’s not a lot of that. The style is also dated, but I am okay with that because I admire the beauty of pre-word processor prose – when you had pen and ink and had to get it right pretty much from the start.
The book is a classic and I have been aware of it for decades. It has been on my ‘eventually must read’ list for as long. So had Thus Spake Zarathustra. Not reading Nietzsche has been bugging me for ages. But when I finally settled down with an audiobook of Thus Spake Zarathustra, I was disappointed. Maybe I had heard so much commentary that reading it was redundant. I quit about 20% through. That’s a rare thing for me to do, but I had better things to do with my time. Would James be the same experience?
I mention all this because I find I come across books at ideal times. Had I read James any earlier I may not have gotten the value from the book that I did. Now and then I reread books I encountered years before – and its always like reading them for the first time. You engage with a book with whatever frame of mind and understanding you have to give you a unique experience with the book. If you encounter the same book a decade later, assuming you have grown in the interval, you will not have the same experience.
I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance around 2006. It had a huge impact on me, so much so that I was eager to encounter it again as an audiobook – in 2021. It was just as remarkable – but it was an entirely different book.
But encountering a book before insights have been matured can also set you off on a fruitless quest – or maybe just a quest for that time?. Would reading James a decade ago been disadvantageous? I don’t know. Maybe an immature apprehension of an idea may have led to a pointless digression.
Now and then
The book is a compilation of 20 lectures James gave in Scotland in 1901/2. I won’t rehash the content of the Wikipedia link above. I want simply to observe that we are a long way and from a time when religious experience was respected as a valid human experience worthy of open academic interest. There’s a hint in the subtitle – A Study in Human Nature. We are moving back in that direction courtesy of neuroscience and psychology. But its still a vexed subject as to whether it is a valid theme of inquiry. Materialism still exerts its dampening influence – though it seems to be weakening year on year in recent times – mercifully.
Engaging with God
Like any book this one is interpreted according to one’s biases and interests. I have spent the past 5 years engaged in my own struggle with what belief is. I concluded, recently, that it all depends on what your psychological needs are.
We are accustomed to imagining that God is claimed to be an objective reality. But the evidence confirms no more than a ‘subjective reality’ which can lead, sometimes, to objective consequences. If you have a need to assert your God is objectively real you will do so. But that’s your need which may not be agreed upon by others.
James affirms the validity of the subjective experience of ‘God’ with its objective consequences. Objectors to the notion that God is objectively real dismiss, also, the subjective experience as invalid. God, ergo, cannot exist, cannot be real.
I will stick to the Christian ideas, with which I am deeply familiar. The Christian God is described as both a member of a pantheon and the supreme cosmic being. But these are two incompatible ideas that can’t be reconciled. Sound contemporary scholarship affirms the pantheistic roots of the Christian idea of God, which persists so long as the Old Testament is an authority. The transition to the ‘mystical’ One/All notion of the divine is asserted as Christianity evolved – but rarely convincingly. Indeed, the mystical version is asserted while the tribal polytheistic god exerts practical influence (via the extrusion from the subjective).
The distinction between the One God and the sole god of tribal pantheistic roots has been blurred in Christianity to unfortunate effect. It has generated utter confusion and theological chaos. One result has been the creation of a fictional deity that is both universal and partisan.
We cannot now look back and make any data-based claims about the reality and impact of the God of the Old Testament. But we can empirically assess the claims made by contemporary Christian about their God. There is a reason why there is a steady stream of disappointed believers departing the faith.
But it is important to appreciate that mystical effects precipitated by the universal divine may still be expressed through the beliefs, practices and offices of Christianity – just not in any uniform or predictable manner. That is to say that if we accept that the subjective is the ground of our reality of beliefs about the divine it will impinge upon our shared sense of objective reality.
A belief that God is objectively real doesn’t mean that God is, or should be thought so, by others. Such a sentiment is psychologically primitive and more suited to a tribal sense of competing divine powers. Christianity is, I think, a confused paradox which activates tribal passions to assert a universal and unique deity.
Why does this matter to an aspiring animist?
How we see the world absolutely depends upon our ideas and these are informed by personal experience and cultural influence. By the time I turned 16 my world view was shaped by Christianity and materialistic science. Both influences were deeply etched upon my psyche.
This was true for my age peers who took two paths. The majority disengaged from religion but never wholly bought the materialist line. They entered a kind of spiritual limbo. If pressed many would now describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’ now – and they would also not actively engaged in spiritual experiences. This is perfectly fine. They are engaged in the experience of being the best human they can be – which is kinda what being ‘spiritual’ is about – or should be.
The second path is that of actively seeking a ‘spiritual life’. This involved selecting from a generous menu of eastern, otherwise indigenous, and archaic traditions which were mostly fused with the needs of urban modernity to create satisfying hybrid systems. This is a completely valid response to a need. It may make no sense to purists, but our needs are not obedient to other people’s notions of what is good, and right, and true. They are obedient to what drives us – from our subjective core.
As noted elsewhere my affection for animism was triggered by accident during an academic inquiry. It suddenly made sense to me. I grew up with multiple ‘non-ordinary’ experiences that I could not understand or place within our culture’s two dominant discourses – Christianity and materialistic science. The alternatives didn’t fit any theoretical model that had any meaning to me until I came across the idea of animism. That was my solution to a deeply vexing problem.
Up to that point I had been involved in Western ritual magic and Wicca and I had read extensively in Buddhism and Zen, as well a wide array of other sources. These were a counter to my exposure to Christianity, which I had consciously rejected at age 7. But I had also grown up with a passion for science – and had lots of ‘non-ordinary’ experiences that didn’t fit any models I was comfortable about accepting. I needed a unifying theory. Animism was a rational toe-hold – the beginnings of a theory.
In Varieties of Religious Experience James affirmed something critical to me. Such experience was, first and foremost, subjective. This is the foundation of the real.
We misunderstand subjective and objective
As I grew up, I was taught that something isn’t real unless it is shareable. If you were the only experiencer, it was subjective and of lesser value – and certainly not entitled to a ‘reality’ claim. This is a bullshit idea of such utter toxicity its impact upon our collective and individual lives has been catastrophic.
We are first and foremost grounded in our subjective experiences. These impact our physical and psychological wellbeing more than anything else. James reminded me that extreme manifestations of ecstatic spiritual bliss are entirely subjective but are accepted (when they are) as valid because their theme accords with cultural and spiritual aspirations of the community. And their affects manifest in a community’s sense of objective reality
Validation/invalidation of subjective experiences is a question of social control. We all live in a social/cultural ecology which privileges natural power structures. Some years a back I read the works of the historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen who asked a question related to an Australian Aboriginal woman who encountered French sailors on a beach in south east Western Australia sometime in the 18th century. We have the French account of what happened. Inga invited the reader to imagine things from the Aboriginal woman’s perspective. She was ‘contaminated’ by strangeness. Was she killed or exiled by her tribe?
The idea that strange beings beyond any accepted notion of what is normal might engage with a person who is not privileged by their culture to encounter such strangeness isn’t okay. It’s a violation of critical safety rules necessary for the psychological, physical, and spiritual wellbeing of the whole community. But we are no longer bound by such rules, even though there persist folks whose themselves as appointed guardians. That’s okay in their own tribe or cult. Its not okay to impose that assumed authority on others. But that exactly what believers and materialists have done. They have been unable or unwilling to adjust to the diversity and pluralism of our culture.
Clendinnen’s account mattered to me because my ‘non-ordinary’ experiences violated my culture’s asserted norm. I was ‘bad’ to the dominant religion and ‘mad’ to the dominant science. I had ‘transgressed’ my culture’s rules by having the experiences – as if I had any say in the matter. James acknowledges that such ‘transgressive’ experiences are part of the valid spectrum of encounters he collects under the umbrella of ‘religious’ experience.
Invalidation, because of ‘offences’ against the normal, is common. In the history of science radical ideas can lead to persecution and the ruination of careers. In organisations ‘whistle-blowers’ can so disrupt the normal that special legislation has been created – and that’s still inadequate. In religion non-conformity has led to torture and murder.
We protect the boundary between the shared and the unique with a sometimes brutal determination. In the early 1970s I worked in several psychiatric hospitals. I was occasionally alarmed by how an otherwise functional person could be ensnared in a culture of oppressive ‘care’ because of a single deviation from our norms. Now I contrast those encounters with communities of individuals enthralled in religious delusions which conform with our social norms. Individual ‘madness’ is transgressive. Collective ‘madness’ is normative.
In Christianity extreme non-conformists who don’t overtly threaten the settled orthodoxy, and the status quo can be protected, indulged, and celebrated as radical exemplars. They may be nothing of the sort. But so long as the context of their extreme behaviour is favourable to the faith looking after them is a good thing. Of course they can also be safely killed and later celebrated as a martyr.
We can usefully see personal experience as subjective and the environment it is lived out in as objective (which is really only many subjectivities mashed together). We assert a necessary connection between the subjective and the objective which requires mutual conformity. This places the power of validating the subjective experiences with objective authority. This isn’t necessarily a fair representation of truth. Who holds objective power gets to rule on what is or is not valid – and real.
What appears as an extreme religious behaviour may also be understood as disordered behaviour expressed in a religious context. If religion is seen as a ‘safe harbour’ it makes sense to express extreme behaviours as religious – so long as they conform to the asserted religious norms.
This is certainly true of psychopathic behaviour. It is possible to be utterly psychopathic so long as one is overtly, and devotedly religious. The persecution, torture and murder of non-conforming or non-compliant individuals is uniquely sanctioned under religious authority – and authoritarian governments of course.
The sanctions for non-conformity against a cultural norm are always strong but are magnified when such a violation offends against religious norms. In part this is because it is assumed that the religious norm equals the existential norm for all individuals. The ‘Church’ speaks on all our behalf’s.
Is God objectively real?
There are two conflicting ideas of the Christian God. One is that of a tribal god who emerged from a polytheistic tradition and had his status inflated to author of the cosmos and the other is the deep mystical sense of the One/the All – the primary foundation of all being.
Christians habitually think in terms of the latter but speak in terms of the former. To say this is confused is generous. In a mystical sense nobody can be ‘against God’ or disobedient. But one can oppose and be disobedient toward a tribal god.
In essence most Christians talk tribal god but imagine mystical God. This confusion permeates the faith with disastrous results. The present conception of God is a theological fiction at best, and a theological delusion at worst.
There is no rational foundation to deny the mystical All/One short of a determined commitment to materialism. There is a range of arguments arising from the proposition that reality is grounded in consciousness that favour the subjective foundation to reality – a universal commonality matched with infinite specificity.
For reasons based on personal experience I do favour the idea that gods are objectively real. I look at my own body and see that there is a hierarchy of entities – my body-as-a-whole, my limbs and organs, sub-units within those organs going all the way down to cells.
We do not know whether the ancient idea of the planets being gods is valid because our materialism muddies our thinking to such a huge degree. We simply cannot think at that scale at the moment. That we have bodies makes sense only if that ‘we’ is beyond the body. A materialist might insist, rather, we are our bodies.
Early on the mystical notion of God was that he was beyond imagination, beyond comprehension, beyond description. This really asserts that the root of reality is spirit or consciousness. Whether this is true or not is beyond demonstration. It is a position we may adopt to satisfy our own needs. Likewise, the materialist may take an equally unprovable position – of which they say they are persuaded by reason. This isn’t so. They are persuaded by their subjective needs – like anybody else.
The Christian God is demonstrably a fiction. Scholars have charted its evolution from its tribal pantheistic origins and there is, so far as I have been able to discover, no reasoned evidence to assert its reality.
Are there other agents we might call gods? I think there are, not because I have incontrovertible evidence (I have had experiences that encourage me in that direction) but because it makes sense that there might be. This doesn’t mean that there are agents with whom humans might have a relationship – just forms of consciousness/spirit which are organised and intentional in their own right. It’s a matter of scale essentially.
Besides, our human heritage affirms we have always thought that there were god or spirits behind the ‘reality’ we perceive in our physical/organic being.
Acts 17:24 says “For in him we live and move and have our being.” I was familiar with this saying from my esoteric education and didn’t know it was in the Bible until I went googling the source. No wonder it is scarcely mentioned. It is a philosophical position at odds with the notion that God and what he creates are distinct.
A divine being who makes ‘reality’ out of their own substance makes eminent sense to me. They can also make lesser gods. An esoteric teacher once explained this to me, saying that the gods were of the One, not as the One.
The moment you insist that God and what is created are separate things you create monstrous problems. This might be sensible for a tribal deity who is a member of a pantheon – in terms of a cultural narrative – when such makes sense to a community. On a larger scale it contradicts not only the deep wisdom of human heritage but also contemporary thoughts about ‘consciousness’ being the foundation of all things.
Conclusion
As James explores the varieties of religious experience, he invites critical reflection predicated on the proposition that religious experience is a valid human experience. The book’s sub-title makes it clear that such validity is assumed.
This is now something we allow is reasonably contested. It isn’t. Materialists will contest the proposition on entirely dogmatic grounds. Religious dogmatists will want to narrow the range of valid ideas to deny those that will not unsettle their dogmatic assertions.
In fact, there is no reasonable contestation. Materialists muddy the water by injecting flat rational denial (not doubt) into a normal and natural sense of uncertainty.
We do not need to absolutely prove a god/no god argument. We do need to understand the utility of ideas of the divine relative to our personal and collective psychological needs. Some may insist our collective spiritual needs – but I see no distinction.
This is best demonstrated by the way we depict our own dramas. We can set a movie in 4,000 BCE or 4,000 CE. Although we can detail the unique ‘objective’ issues of setting and technologies to fit the age we select we cannot usefully stray from the limits of ‘subjective’ reality. We must remain within the limits of the spectrum of relatable experiences available to us.
We are subjective beings first and objective/organic beings second. The efforts of materialism to flip the order have had a catastrophic impact on our past models. And maybe that’s been a good and necessary, if painful, step in our evolution. I will allow that moving from one mode of thought to another requires rejection of the old. Materialism might be a necessary transition between a before and after psycho-spiritual state.
I have argued elsewhere that our sense of spiritual being must be liberated from the fixed and dogmatic models that dominated our past. Christianity was a hugely disruptive way of belief that led to the downfall of what we now call ‘pagan’ belief systems. It does look like it was time they receded. The same seems now true of Christianity. The counter isn’t the crude rationalism of materialism. It’s what is emerging through freer and more empathic scholarship, more open exploration of NDEs and OOBEs, inquiry into psychotropics as medicine, and developments in neuroscience and psychology.
We are so far beyond the iron age agrarian narratives that framed Christianity and the other faiths ‘of the book’. It isn’t that we have utterly discredited the ideas from so long ago so much as affirmed the deeper wisdoms while dispelling explanatory narratives that have not sustained their merit against our current ways of knowing. Such ways are, to be fair, still contaminated and distorted by materialism, but we cannot deny the progress made.
We are on the edge of a watershed between two ages. Yes, I know this is hardly a novel idea, but that edge can be a few centuries wide. The markers of the decline of Christianity are debatable, but the decline is not. Arguments about when we move from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius continue without resolution. It must happen sometime – eventually.
I invite the reader to imagine they are in that transition phase which may or may not end during their time here. We are not thinking in terms of certainties and dogmas but in terms of trends and potentialities. We can prepare for what is coming by letting go of what has been. This isn’t everyone’s idea of a good thing, but there is no mercy when changes come. We go with the flow or we are exhausted in our efforts to resist.
The logic of religious faith has been that it endures. But faith in what is true and real isn’t the same as faith in the dogmas and discourses. James affirms the validity of experiences arising from what is true and real as fundamental to our human nature. We are innately religious on that level.
Our capacity to be captured by dogma and discourses on culture and tradition is another matter. It serves the interests of the captors to merge the two. Indeed, there was a time when this was a necessary and critical merger. But those times are gone.
James wrote his book when those times were unravelling, and it was time to imagine that religious experiences could be described as a ‘variety’. Back then dominance of one faith tradition made the idea of a variety perilous. Then materialism made any experience invalid. True, materialism didn’t eradicate faith, but it did cripple inquiry. We are now struggling under that dogmatic penalty in so many ways.
But what is also true is that the latter part of the 19th century was a cauldron of new ideas – which continued bubbling into the 20th century. Christianity allied with materialism to suppress this exciting period. It has seemed strange to me that two erstwhile foes united to invalidate the enthusiasm for novel and unregulated spiritual experience. Was it that threatening?
Studies show that adherence to formal religion is declining. Materialism seems to have obtained a stubborn toehold that isn’t growing into a foothold. There is growth among those who say they are ‘spiritual but not religious’. That is a healthy sign. We are eschewing dogma in favour authentic personal values. I see more of the ‘Christian spirit’ in secular action than in a lot over overtly religious behaviour.
And as generational change is weakening the grip of materialistic dogma on inquiry, we are seeing more free examination of themes that challenge our assumptions about the nature of our shared reality. Daniel Drasin’s A New Science of the Afterlife is an excellent succinct survey.
I commend Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature to you.
Note: Recently a reader commented that they disagreed with what I had written and expressed concern I might be offended. I replied I had no desire to stimulate agreement. In fact, I would be horrified. My intent only is to stimulate thought and self-reflection. You alone are responsible for what you think and believe. All I offer is stimulation.